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Public vs media opinion on robots and their evolution over recent years

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Abstract

During recent years, the fast proliferation of robots in people’s everyday lives calls for a profound examination of public consensus, which is the ultimate determinant of the future of this industry. This paper investigates text corpora, consisting of posts in Google News, Bing News, and Kickstarter, over an 8-year period and Twitter over a 1-year period, to quantify the public’s and media’s opinion about this emerging technology. The results of our analysis demonstrate that news platforms and the public take an overall positive position on robots. However, there is a deviation between news coverage and Twitter users’ attitudes. Among various robot types, sex robots raise the fiercest debate. Besides, based on our analysis the public and news media conceptualization of robotics has altered over recent years. More specifically, a shift from solely industrial-purpose machines, towards more social, assistive, and multi-purpose gadgets is visible.

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Notes

  1. https://irobot.com/.

  2. http://touchbionics.com/.

  3. https://anki.com/en-us.html/.

  4. https://heykuri.com/life-with-kuri/.

  5. https://twitter.com.

  6. http://ementalist.ai.

  7. Python 3.7.0.

  8. https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/clustering.html.

  9. https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/cluster.vq.html.

  10. After preprocessing the documents, we use Gensim package in Pyhton to include the bigrams.

  11. https://sentiwordnet.isti.cnr.it/.

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Author notes

  1. Alireza Javaheri and Navid Moghadamnejad have contributed equally to the paper and they are co-first authors.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Independent Researcher, Rouen, France

    Alireza Javaheri

  2. Independent Researcher, Togliatti, Russia

    Navid Moghadamnejad

  3. Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

    Hamidreza Keshavarz

  4. The Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Ehsan Javaheri

  5. The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    Chelsea Dobbins

  6. University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Elaheh Momeni-Ortner

  7. Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    Reza Rawassizadeh

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  1. Alireza Javaheri
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  2. Navid Moghadamnejad
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Correspondence to Reza Rawassizadeh.

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Javaheri, A., Moghadamnejad, N., Keshavarz, H. et al. Public vs media opinion on robots and their evolution over recent years. CCF Trans. Pervasive Comp. Interact. 2, 189–205 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42486-020-00035-1

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